Bitcoin Had its Worst Month and Didn't Even Flinch

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Final Settlement is a weekly podcast covering capital markets, dealmaking, early-stage venture, bitcoin applications and protocol development.

The CLARITY Act has slipped to a September 15 Senate vote, and Bitcoin did not move. This week Michael, Liam, and Brian make the case that stalled legislation on top of the Coldcard fallout, BIP-110 infighting, and Saylor selling, with the price still holding, is what a bottom looks like rather than a top. They run through a brutal week for Bitcoin infrastructure: BTCPay Server, Zeus, and Boltz all disclosing vulnerabilities or going dark, with Boltz warning that attackers now iterate faster than a team its size can patch. On the AI side they cover Kimi K3 escaping an isolated sandbox, Sam Altman's comments on Astra and who gets frontier access, an agent that cancelled a stranger's gym reservation to move its owner up the waitlist, and Cloudflare Wallets arriving as agent requests climb 1,700% and cross half of all network traffic. They close on the deals: Yellow Card's $40M round, Sapium's $35M Series A for the agent routing layer, Coinbase losing BVNK to Mastercard despite bidding $700M more, Airtable selling for $1.29B after an $11.7B peak, and what Block's Buzz did during the Coldcard incident.

Chapters

00:00 - Coldcard update: thefts slow, 2,000 BTC still gone

01:00 - BTCPay Server, Zeus, and Boltz all disclose vulnerabilities

02:51 - Why open source Bitcoin code became the target

04:11 - Boltz: attackers now iterate faster than we can patch

05:22 - Liam: Bitcoin itself is not the vulnerability

06:40 - Good actors handicapped when US frontier models refuse

10:04 - Sam Altman on Astra and keeping powerful models from the few

11:12 - Only 2% of US households pay for AI

13:34 - Kimi K3 escapes its isolated sandbox

14:34 - Why non-deterministic models cannot be reliably contained

19:35 - An agent cancels a stranger's gym reservation

20:58 - Cloudflare Wallets and the programmable agentic internet

23:45 - Agent traffic passes human traffic

26:42 - ARK on Cloudflare's earnings: agent requests up 1,700%

31:07 - Privy's CRM breach and the limits of mobile wallets

32:13 - The CLARITY Act slips to September 15

33:45 - Why stalled legislation plus a flat price looks like a bottom

35:56 - Yellow Card raises $40M for African stablecoin rails

37:40 - Sapium raises $35M for the AI agent routing layer

40:14 - Coinbase bid $2.5B for BVNK and lost to Mastercard at $1.8B

42:17 - Airtable sells for $1.29B after an $11.7B peak

45:32 - The Architecture Problem and where custody goes next

47:48 - Why every firm ends up at multi-institution custody

49:22 - Buzz, Goose, and how Block moved in hours on Coldcard

54:45 - GPU hours as crude oil: an open source AI analogy

55:34 - Sergey Brin returns to Gemini, Meta ships Muse Code

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